letter jan 22

Dear Everyone,
This might be the last letter I send as an attachment. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find an easy way to send you all automatic email that I have a new posting on my blog, so I will have to do it manually. But in the future, you will just get an email with a URL pointer. Of course, writing to the blog may pose some minor difficulties for me, chief of which may be the possible loss of the efforts of my copy editor, Cindy Scalzo - - yes, she edits and often adds material to these letters; I have been lying to you all these years when I claimed to be the sole auteur of these missives. I am sure I can work something out with her though.

I will go through the events of the last few weeks in backward chronology. Yesterday we left the house around noon to see the long-eared owls. There is a parliament of eleven of them, roosting in some pine trees at the south east corner of a small park located on W 13th street and S. Plymouth court, Chicago IL 60605. You can Google Maps the location. It is the small park with the three water basins at the northern end. It was just Cindy, the boys and me, as Nicola was in New York City (more later). Mom told me about the owls, although they were also written about in the Tribune and the Sun Times. Here is a video of them from the Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagolive.com/animals_pets/longeared_owls_unusual_visitor/. And here is a picture:

Barbara thinks they are probably eating rats located in the train yard just across the South Fork of the Chicago River, which is just west of their roost. I don’t know how impressed the boys were at seeing these owls - - you can get within 10 –15 feet of them. I think this may have been the first time I have seen them though. We were there on an exceptionally cold day, with temperatures hovering around 0 F. There were still at least a half-dozen other people with cameras, telescopes, etc looking at the owls. I was also impressed with how gentrified this area has become in the last fifteen years, with nearby Starbucks and the other accoutrements of Yuppie-dom. Cindy and I lived at the corner of Congress and Dearborn fifteen years ago, and I don’t recall us ever going south of Polk Street.

After the owls, the boys were kind enough to allow me to go to the Field Museum. I wanted to see the evolution exhibit, known as the evolving planet (http://www.fieldmuseum.org/evolvingplanet/index.html ). This really was excellent, especially in the Precambrian and Cambrian eras. I was really impressed by the ‘virtual reality’ Cambrian aquarium, but the other videos were very instructive as well. The dinosaur bones were well mounted, but there were really too many of them! Too bad there weren’t claymation scenes of triceratops fighting T. rex! After this exhibit we also passed by the famous diorama of Chinese hell complete with a dozen or so hell demons/judges with some poor human being crushed by a rice pounder, and another person (all you see are the legs) stuck in a grindstone, with a little dog lapping up the blood. This scene always creeped me out as a kid; so of course I wanted Lucas and Jasper to see it. This exhibit is now in the musty southeast corner of the 2nd floor, is poorly lit, and you can hardly read the long typed explanation of the scene. Mom, you need to get them to revitalize this exhibit! I am always surprised by the Field, because although I have been going there for forty years, I still feel completely overwhelmed by the material that is on exhibit; let alone what must be in storage. As we were walking out we passed by a temporary exhibit on the southwest corner of the 1st floor on the Crow Indians, but the boys wanted to go home. We did look at a display of all sorts of different shoes and boots. One was a pair of moccasins that had leggings at least four feet long. We couldn’t figure out how they were worn, maybe with the leggings dragging behind like a wedding train?

We went home to see the juggernaut Patriots win another game, and the Packers to blow it at the last minute. I also taped a PBS production of Northanger Abbey for Nicola.
Saturday morning, Cindy and I got up early to take Nicola to O’Hare, to catch a flight to Newark. She was going to spend a few days with ‘Aunt’ Melanie in New York. Cindy found a cheap air ticket to Newark, and I guess as part of her fifteenth birthday present (Jan 18), we decided she was capable of flying on her own (although Cindy really wanted to go too). It was Nikki’s first solo trip to NYC and the first time to fly without being registered as an unaccompanied minor. All of the kids had a four day weekend, with today (Monday) being Martin Luther King Day, and Friday a teacher institute day, or something. Nicola had finished all of her finals on Thursday, and it looks like she did pretty well scholastically in her first semester of High school. Not like me where I was ill prepared for the Exeter work load, and just missed flunking almost everything by the mercies of my teachers. Still, I think she has found High school to be a bit more challenging than Grammar school.

Around noon on Sat., Lucas, Cindy and I drove to Mitsuwas (http://www.mitsuwachicago.net/) to check out the grocery store, food court and book store. Jasper was too cranky to come with us. We looked for some manga for the kids, but all of the books were in Japanese. We bought some food, including seaweed salad, takuan (yellow pickled radish), shumai, rice crackers, pocky (chocolate covered pretzel-like things http://www.alde.com/anime/pocky1.html ), etc. We didn’t buy any sushi grade tuna (about $40 per Lb.), but Lucas enjoyed some tuna sushi for lunch.
In the early evening I went to the dojo to help set up for a Christmas party. We all know that Christmas was almost a month ago, but this is the time that was available to us - - by the same token, the Pathology Department Holiday party will be this coming weekend. We vacuumed, hung up lights, stuffed a piñata, etc. I had some food and beer, but left before the piñata was broken - - it can be a near lethal experience to hang around for that! Our first year in Chicago, Jasper got beaned because some kid let the bat go and it went flying into him. Later that evening, after Naruto, Cindy and I watched The Prestige, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_(film) a strange movie about two 19th century magicians, with some science fiction elements thrown in via Nikola Tesla (played by, of all people, David Bowie!). It was an interesting movie, but filmed in very dark colors, which does not play well on our TV. It was hard to figure out what was going on. Especially as the plot jumps back and forth in time, and between characters.

At work the big thing has been rolling out a LEAN program for surgical pathology. LEAN is a work efficiency system originated by Toyota (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing) ; you may recall that in November a team of us went out to Detroit to see how they are using LEAN techniques to improve their quality. So, we had a big kick-off here last Thursday, with Pizza and a slide show created by the head pathology administrator. We have set up three teams, one to examine specimen accessioning, one for gross specimen handling (cutting up specimens), and one for histotechnology (making, staining and labeling slides). Some how, I have been put in charge of this whole process. We’ll see how much success comes about.

I already have difficulty trying to remember what we did the weekend before. It must be the lipitor. Cindy and I watched a movie For Your Consideration, a Christopher Guest satire/mockumentary about a small indie film getting crossed up by Oscar ™ rumors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Your_Consideration_(film) Catharine O’Hara, who has been in most of his films, is great in this - - she should have gotten an Academy Award!
Love H.